Tech News

If you thought everyone loved cryptocurrency, think again: Apple has banned cryptocurrency mining on iOS devices. In a change that has coincided with WWDC, Apple has quietly updated the terms on the app store. Guidelines now state that "Apps, including any third party advertisements displayed within them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining." First spotted by Apple Insider, this move by Apple actually follows a series of actions by tech companies to tackle a number of issues in the cryptocurrency world. Earlier this year both Google and Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads too - all of which suggests the cryptocurrency bubble might be slowly bursting. There is a slight loophole - Apple's guidelines allow you to mine cryptocurrency provided it's done externally to the device. Cloud mining would be fine. Of course, why you'd want to mine, say, Bitcoim, with your IPhone does seema bit strange. Given users complain about battery life now, the processing power required to mine cryptocurrency will sap your device's life incredibly quickly. Here is the main section of cryptocurrencies in the app store guidelines: 3.1.5 (b) Cryptocurrencies: (i) Wallets: Apps may facilitate virtual currency storage, provided they are offered by developers enrolled as an organization. (ii) Mining: Apps may not mine for cryptocurrencies unless the processing is performed off device (e.g. cloud-based mining). (iii) Exchanges: Apps may facilitate transactions or transmissions of cryptocurrency on an approved exchange, provided they are offered by the exchange itself. (iv) Initial Coin Offerings: Apps facilitating Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”), cryptocurrency futures trading, and other crypto-securities or quasi-securities trading must come from established banks, securities firms, futures commission merchants (“FCM”), or other approved financial institutions and must comply with all applicable law. (v) Cryptocurrency apps may not offer currency for completing tasks, such as downloading other apps, encouraging other users to download, posting to social networks, etc.

Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2019, the next major version of its signature IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for software design. This exciting news has come right on the heels of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. According to Microsoft, the company is still in the "early planning phase" for Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. Release timing will be shared “in the coming months,” with the company simply promising “to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively.” Along with general improvements to make the developer tool more reliable and more productive, Microsoft has some concrete goals in mind. Last month at Build 2018 developers conference, Microsoft demonstrated two new Visual Studio previews: IntelliCode and Live Share. The former uses AI to offer intelligent suggestions that improve code quality and productivity, and the latter lets developers collaborate in real time with team members who can edit and debug directly from Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Specific features that will be delivered in VS2019 are not provided, rather Microsoft lists various themes that the project will address. Here are the major new features Microsoft will bring in Visual Studio 2019 in coming days : It will continue to explore connected capabilities such as Live Share, for users to collaborate in real time on the same code base worldwide. It wants to investigate making cloud development situations, such as working with online source repositories, smoother. Enhancements for AI-assisted development via IntelliCode and use of the Azure cloud to deliver AI-powered assistance to developers. Operational enhancements such as additional refactoring, quicker application load, faster builds, improved navigation, and improved debugging. The release date for VS2019 is not available yet, but VS2017 was released in March 2017 and was preceded by several preview builds throughout 2016. Similarly, one would expect the first preview build of VS2019 in late summer / early autumn this year.  Fortunately VS2019 is being designed to install side-by-side with existing VS2017 builds, so it will be easy to try out the new release when it is available. A key fact about this next release, according to Microsoft, is that it will remain a 32-bit application and will support Windows 7. Initial developer reactions indicate there are concerns about the unresolved issues and code quality problems with VS2017, and that it is premature to shift to VS2019.  Microsoft does not offer specifics, but does indicate that they are working to improve this with the development team. Microsoft is going to acquire GitHub Unit Testing in .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 for better code quality What’s new in Visual Studio 1.22  

If you create web applications as a profession then you would be definitely needing an auditing tool to check what works and what doesn’t in your app. Google Lighthouse is one such tool. It saves a lot of time for you to assess your website’s performance and make it better. You can simply put any URL into Google Lighthouse, (with proper permissions of course) and it will audit it for performance issues and will create a separate report for each issue with ways to rectify it. You can use Lighthouse from the chrome dev tools or you can use it with npn tools as well. Google has announced the release of Lighthouse version 3 in the latest Google I/O conference. The new features of Lighthouse are mentioned below: Lighthouse 3 comes equipped with a new audit engine called Lantern. This helps in improved audits and also minimizes the variance between different audits. The reason for improved audits is that Lantern runs the audits in the same CPU and network environments and simulates the app performance in a regular environment. Lighthouse comes now with a new and improved UI that helps developers to better understand the issues related to their apps and take actionable insights from it. Image Courtesy: Google Uniformity of operation: Both the CLI based version as well as the Node.js version have the same set of controls so that it’s easier to use and less confusing for different sets of developers. Lighthouse has changed their scoring model which now considers 50 out of 100 score as 75 percentile. They have made it systematically harder to achieve the perfect score making the testing and auditing process much more stringent. 4 new audit types have been introduced. The first shows the time to load the first image or text, the second shows the validity of the robots.txt file. The third test shows ways to change videos to gifs and still preserve the video tag to improve the load time. The fourth test enables links to preload before the website loads. The final report is now distributed into three parts to facilitate the developer’s understanding of the scenario and improve the performance. These are the 1hr report which reports the results of the audit, the artifacts property report which includes the data collected from Chrome, and the final report includes the formatted report HTML/JSON/CSV as a string. Will these changes impact the way you develop your apps and make them fare better in the crowd? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section. Top 5 Google I/O 2018 conference Day 1 Highlights What can Google Duplex do for businesses? Google announces Chrome 67 packed with powerful APIs, password-free logins, PWA support, and more

Facebook has announced the open-source release of Sonar, their cross-platform debugging tool. Sonar is designed to aid developers, framework experts and engineers collaborate on the app development process. Sonar is built on Facebook’s Stetho, an Android debugging bridge built on Chrome's developer tools. Sonar further adds more extensible features to Stetho such as plugins to help engineers develop new features, investigate bugs and optimize apps. Sonar is a cross-platform debugging tool. Hence developers can connect their mobile devices (Android and iOS or an emulator) to a desktop client for inspection. Sonar works as a guide and interpreter to a running app providing developers with stats on what an app is doing to better understand bugs and system capabilities. Sonar is now available for the developer community at large, not just Facebook engineers, as an open-source software project via GitHub. As Sonar was designed with extensibility in focus, it made use of a lot of external plugins. With the open sourcing of Sonar, these plugins are also being open-sourced. Some of these include: Logs, a plugin that shows device logs without the need for additional setup. Layout Inspector, a debugging platform that provides deep dives into user interface hierarchies and supports Litho and ComponentKit components. Network, a plugin that enables the inspection of network packets as they pass into and out of the app in question. Sonar architecture Sonar’s architecture has two parts, a desktop client, and a mobile SDK. The desktop client is built on top of Electron, and Facebook's projects such as React.js, Flow, Metro, RSocket, and Yarn. The mobile SDK is installed within the Android or iOS application and interacts with the desktop client. The mobile SDK makes use of Facebook open source projects such as Folly and RSocket. Plugins are available for both Desktop client and Mobile SDK. Desktop client plugins render the UI and a mobile SDK plugin exposes the data. A React component extends the desktop plugin class. This React component is in charge of communicating with the mobile SDK plugin and rendering any data it delivers. The mobile SDK plugin is developed in the language native to the platform on which it will run (Swift/Objective-C on iOS or Java/Kotlin on Android). It registers a set of handlers and defines responses for them. Source: Facebook Blog Emil Sjölander, Facebook software engineer hopes that “open-sourcing Sonar and the accompanying plugins will provide a useful tool for other engineers working on mobile applications.” He says that “As we've already seen Sonar prove useful internally at Facebook, we think Sonar's APIs will help other engineers build great new experiences to improve their workflows.” You can read about the full release coverage on Facebook code blog. Jest 23, Facebook’s popular framework for testing React applications is now released Facebook’s F8 Conference – 5 key announcements Testing Single Page Applications (SPAs) using Vue.js developer tools

World’s most powerful and smartest supercomputer, called Summit, has been revealed by IBM and Department of Energy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is capable of performing 200 quadrillion calculations each second, a speed called 200 petaflops which is almost as fast as 7.6 billion people on the planet doing 26 million calculations each second on a basic calculator. Summit was funded back in 2014. It was a part of $325 million Department of Energy program called Coral, but it took quite a few years to develop Summit. Summit is capable of delivering high speed with a new processor, quick storage capacity, internal communications, and a versatile design that can use Artificial Intelligence methods. This makes it quite expensive. Let’s have a look at the features that the Summit Supercomputer entails. Supercomputer and AI integration Dave Turek, vice president of high-performance computing and cognitive systems at IBM said that AI and high-performance computing are not different domains. The two are deeply interconnected to each other which is why Summit will be seen using AI methods for different purposes. Summit will mainly be used for AI development and machine learning. Apart from AI, Oak Ridge will be using Summit to carry out scientific research in subjects such as chemical formula designing, studying links between cancer and genes on a large scale, fusion energy investigation, universe research using astrophysics and simulation of changing Earth’s climate. Super Big Supercomputer Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Summit consists of 4,608 interconnected computer servers, housed in huge refrigerator-sized cabinets. It takes up an eighth of an acre, which, to put into perspective is the size of two tennis courts. Peak energy consumption of Summit is 15 megawatts which have the capacity to power more than 7,000 homes. Each server has two IBM Power9 chips at 3.1 GHz. Each chip has 22 cores running in parallel and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each. Each server consists of 1.6 terabytes of memory and data can be saved at 2.2 terabytes each second on a storage system of 250-petabyte which is 1000 times the storage capacity of a high-end laptop. Supercomputer performance measure Supercomputers’ performance is measured in terms of a benchmark called Linpack in the top 500 list and China's Sunway TaihuLight grabs the highest Linpack score of 93 petaflops. But Turek feels that measuring the value of a machine based on a single figure of merit is not that accurate; rather a machine should be able to scale on real applications. This is IBM’s attempt to exascale in the future. With Summit, IBM is quite convinced that it can reach its goal to build a system capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second (five times that of Summit). Along with Summit, there is also work being done on a less powerful computer, Sierra. Both are scheduled to go online sometime this year. This will take U.S’s arsenal of supercomputers a step forward in terms of competition. Lately, the top spots have been held by other countries, but Summit can become the United States’ chance to stay ahead in the game by retaking the lead. PyCon US 2018 Highlights: Quantum computing, blockchains, and serverless rule! Quantum A.I. : An intelligent mix of Quantum+A.I. Q# 101: Getting to know the basics of Microsoft’s new quantum computing language  

Nativescript version 4.1 has been released with multiple performance improvements and major highlights such as support for Angular 6, faster app launch time, new UI scenarios and much more. Android 6 support NativeScript 4.1 Angular integration has been updated with support for Angular 6. And since Angular 6 requires webpack 4, developers have to update to nativescript-dev-webpack 0.12.0 as well. V8 engine now available in v6.6 The V8 Engine is now upgraded to version 6.6. The new engine adds major performance boost, JavaScript language features, code caching after execution, removal of AST numbering, and multiple asynchronous performance improvements. Faster Android startup time The upgrade to V8 6.6 and webpack 4, also brings faster app launch time on Android making it on par with iOS. Depending on the device and the specific app, Android app startup time is now between 800ms on high-end devices, to 1.8s on older devices. This is an improvement of almost 50% compared to the startup time in Nativescript v4.0! Improvements to user interfaces Nativescript 4.1 adds augmented reality with support for ARKit for iOS by adding the built-in vector type. Multiple iOS Simulators Nativescript 4.1, can now run applications simultaneously on multiple iOS Simulators, iOS devices, Android emulators, and Android devices. Developers can LiveSync change on iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPad 2, etc. and immediately see how the application looks and behaves on all of them. Navigation in a Modal View There are updates to navigation in modal view as well. Before version 4.1, for navigation inside a modal view, you had to remove the implicit wrapper and specify the root element of the modal view. With the new changes, the first element of the modal view becomes its root view and developers can place a page router outlet there, for proper navigation. LayoutChanged Event Nativescript 4.1 introduces layoutChanged event that will be fired when the layout bounds of a view changes due to layout processing. The correct view sizes are obtained with getActualSize(). Proper view sizes are especially useful when dealing with size-dependent animations. The full list of bug updates and other fixes are available in the changelog. You can read more about the release on the Nativescript blog. NativeScript: What is it, and how to set it up How to integrate Firebase with NativeScript for cross-platform app development

Microsoft stated that its recent addition, SAP Cloud Platform is now generally on its Azure Platform. The SAP cloud platform enables developers to build SAP applications and extensions using PaaS development platform along with integrated services. With the SAP platform becoming generally available, developers can now deploy Cloud Foundry-based SAP Cloud Platform on Azure. This is currently available in the West Europe region and Microsoft is working with SAP to enable more regions to use it in the months to come. With SAP HANA’s availability on Microsoft Azure, one can expect: Largest SAP HANA optimized VM size in the cloud Microsoft would be soon launching an Azure-M series, which will support large memory virtual machines with sizes up to 12 TB, which would be based on Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors and will offer the most memory available of any VM in the public cloud. The M series will help customers to push the limits of virtualization in the cloud for SAP HANA. Availability of a range of SAP HANA certified VMs For customers who wish to use small instances, Microsoft also offers smaller M-series VM sizes. These range from 192 GB – 4 TB with 10 different VM sizes and extend Azure’s SAP HANA certified M-series VM. These smaller M-series offer on-demand and SAP certified instances with a flexibility to spin-up or scale-up in less time. It also offers instances to spin-down to save costs within a pay-as-you-go model available worldwide. Such a flexibility and agility is not possible with a private cloud or on-premises SAP HANA deployment. 24 TB bare-metal instance and optimized price per TB For customers that need a higher performance dedicated offering for SAP HANA, Microsoft now offers additional SAP HANA TDIv5 options of 6 TB, 12 TB, 18 TB, and 24 TB configurations in addition to their current configurations from 0.7TB to 20 TB. For customers who require more memory but the same number of cores, these configurations enable them to get a better price per TB deployed. A lot more options for SAP HANA in the cloud SAP HANA has 26 distinct offerings from 192 GB to 24 TB, scale-up certification up to 20 TB and scale-out certification up to 60 TB. It offers global availability in 12 regions with plans to increase to 22 regions in the next 6 months, Azure now offers the most choice for SAP HANA workloads of any public cloud. Microsoft Azure also enables customers, To extract insights and analytics from SAP data with services such as Azure Data Factory SAP HANA connector to automate data pipelines Azure Data Lake Store for hyper-scale data storage and Power BI An industry leading self-service visualization tool, to create rich dashboards and reports from SAP ERP data. Read more about this news about SAP Cloud Platform on Azure, on Microsoft Azure blog. How to perform predictive forecasting in SAP Analytics Cloud Epicor partners with Microsoft Azure to adopt Cloud ERP New updates to Microsoft Azure services for SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL

TensorFlow Community keeps rolling with updates. The first release candidate for next minor version release 1.9.0 is unveiled today with pretty good list of features, improvements and bug fixes. In its previous version 1.8.0 release, the team paid more attention towards supporting GPU memory, running on multiple GPUs and cloud performance. In today’s release, the team were strong in adding support to Keras, gradient estimators and improvement in the layers. Major features and improvements in TensorFlow 1.9.0-rc0: Updated tf.keras to the Keras 2.1.6 API. tfe.Network is deprecated and can be inherited from tf.keras.Model. Added support of core feature columns and losses to gradient boosted trees estimators. The distributions.Bijector API supports broadcasting for Bijectors with new API changes. Layered variable names changed Bug Fixes in TensorFlow 1.9.0-rc0: The DatasetBase::DebugString() method is now const. Added the tf.contrib.data.sample_from_datasets() API for randomly sampling from multiple datasets. Eager Execution and Accelerated Linear Algebra (XLA) fixed. tf.keras.Model.save_weights by default saves in TensorFlow format. TensorFlow Debugger (tfdbg) CLI fixed. Added "constrained_optimization" to tensorflow/contrib. tf.contrib.framework.zero_initializer supports ResourceVariable. tf.contrib.data.make_csv_dataset() supports line breaks in quoted strings. Miscellaneous changes: Added GCS Configuration Ops. MakeIterator signature changed to enable propagating error status. KL divergence for two Dirichlet distributions. More consistent GcsFileSystem behavior for reads past EOF. Added Benchmark for tf.scan in graph and eager modes. Added complex128 support to FFT, FFT2D, FFT3D, IFFT, IFFT2D, and IFFT3D. Support for preventing tf.gradients() from backpropagating through integer tensors. Supports indicator column in boosted trees. Conv3D, Conv3DBackpropInput, Conv3DBackpropFilter now supports arbitrary. LinearOperator[1D,2D,3D]Circulant added to tensorflow.linalg. Allows LinearOperator to broadcast. For the complete list of bug fixes and improvements, you can read TensorFlow’s Github page. You can also download the source code to access all the exciting features of TensorFlow 1.9.0-rc0. Implementing feedforward networks with TensorFlow How TFLearn makes building TensorFlow models easier Distributed TensorFlow: Working with multiple GPUs and servers

Keras team has announced a new version 2.2.0 with notable features to allow developers to perform deep learning with ease. This release has brought new API changes, new input modes, bug fixes and performance improvements to the high-level neural network API. Keras is a popular neural network API which is capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK or Theano. This Python API is developed with a focus on bringing fast experimentation results, thus taking least possible delay while doing research. It is a highly efficient library allowing easy and fast prototyping, and can even run seamlessly on CPU and GPU. Some of the noteworthy changes available in Keras 2.2.0: New areas of improvements A new API called Model subclassing is added for model definition. They have added a new input mode which provides the ability to call models on TensorFlow tensors directly (however this is applicable to TensorFlow backend only). More improved feature coverage of Keras with the CNTK and Theano backends. Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements are done to the Keras API Now, Keras engine will follow a much more modular structure, thus improving code structure, code health, and reduced test time. Keras modules applications and preprocessing are now externalized to their own repositories such as keras-applications and keras-preprocessing respectively. New API changes MobileNetV2 application added which is available for all backends. Enabled CNTK and Theano support for applications Xception and MobileNet. They have also extended their support for layers SeparableConv1D, SeparableConv2D, as well as the backend methods separable_conv1d and separable_conv2d. which was previously only available for TensorFlow. Now you can feed symbolic tensors to models, with TensorFlow backend. Support for input masking in the TimeDistributed layer. ReLU activation is made easier to configure while retaining easy serialization capabilities by adding an advanced_activation layer ReLU. In order to have a complete list of new API changes, you can visit Github. Breaking changes They have removed the legacy Merge layers and their related functionalities which were the remains of Keras 0. These layers were deprecated in May 2016, with full eviction schedules for August 2017. From now on models from the Keras 0 API using these layers will not be loaded with Keras 2.2.0 and above. The base initializer called truncated_normal now return values that are scaled by ~0.9 thus providing the correct variance value after truncation. For the full list of updates, you can refer the release notes. Read more Why you should use Keras for deep learning Implementing Deep Learning with Keras 2 ways to customize your deep learning models with Keras How to build Deep convolutional GAN using TensorFlow and Keras

“I don’t want to spend $600 to have a box on my head when I play video games” or “Too many cables, not enough games” are some of the statements you’ll hear quite often if you come across a Virtual Reality non-believer. Despite all the criticism that the Virtual Reality gaming industry receives, game developers across the world think differently. This year’s Skill Up report highlights what game developers feel about the VR world. A whopping 86% of respondents said ‘Yes, VR is here to stay’. With issues like heavy hardware, motion sickness, etc, getting fixed as the advancement in the VR technology continues, let’s have a look at other reasons for VR commanding a high level of confidence among game developers. Why is VR here to stay? VR hardware manufacturing is rising The future of Virtual Reality is already set in motion. From Google kickstarting the VR industry by releasing Google Cardboard back in 2014, just look at the number of latest releases in VR headsets in the past six months now and you can do the math yourself. With the likes of Lenovo Mirage Solo, Oculus Go, HTC Vive Pro, Oculus Rift, Sony PlayStation VR and Samsung Odyssey entering the market, it’s quite evident that there is a growing demand for the VR headsets. In addition to headsets being produced extensively, there are dedicated chipsets such as the latest Qualcomm’s XR1 chipset being built to support these headsets and solve the ever-concerning problem in the VR world: High prices. HTC (Vive), Vuzix, Meta, and Pico, are among the others that are working towards creating dedicated chipsets for the standalone headsets. Prices are falling Virtual Reality manufacturers across the globe have a common goal in mind: to make manufacturing of the VR hardware cheaper. Oculus was the first one to drop the prices of the Oculus Rift permanently to $399. Later, Sony joined in by bringing the price of its PlayStation VR  down to as low as $200. Another common complaint regarding the price of the VR headsets is that all VR headsets required additional computing power and hardware to make them operable making it not an average Jane/Joe’s cup of tea. But that problem seems to be fast disappearing with the release of standalone headsets now. Qualcomm recently announced a new chipset for standalone AR/VR headsets at Augmented World Expo. More games to hit the market “There aren’t enough AAA games for the VR world”. Listen closely, and you’ll notice a VR non-believer expressing their disbelief towards the VR world. But, the Virtual Reality Industry is smart. It keeps coming up with ways to pull even the hardcore console gamers into the enticing VR space. The immersive nature of Virtual Reality provides a potential to build fascinating games that catch people’s interest. Events such as the Annual Game developers conference, VR & AR Developer Conference, and PAX East ignite the interest of developers to create these innovative games even more. With already popular VR games such as Doom, Fallout, Perception, etc in existence, there are other games on their way to hit the market. For instance, creators of Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment have announced that a brand new AAA VR title in partnership with Oculus will get released in 2019. Respawn is working hard in this new field and will be challenging other studios in what future gaming for VR looks like. VR isn’t just limited to headsets People confuse VR being limited to just headsets and games. But it is so much more than that. There are different fields leveraging the potential of Virtual Reality. For instance, NASA uses Virtual Reality Lab to train astronauts. NASA is also looking into using headsets like the HTC Vive, VR gloves from 3rd party developers, and assets from games like Mars 2030 and Earthlight to make VR training simulations for a fraction of the cost. Other industries that can immediately benefit from using Virtual Reality are Healthcare, Education, Museum, Entertainment, among others. For instance, Doctors use VR to treat anxiety disorders and phobias, while some at Stanford University used it to set up practice spaces for surgeons. Testing autonomous vehicles for safety purposes also uses the wonders of Virtual Reality for simulation purposes. It will also help speed up the development of Autonomous Vehicles. Similarly, in the education space, one can use Virtual Reality in the classroom to visualize certain concepts related to physics for students. People can be transported back to the Bronze Age with the help of VR in Museums. The Entertainment Industry has been making VR movies such as Walking New York, From nothing, Surge, etc, which create an altogether different experience for the viewers by making them feel like they’re actually present in the scenario of the VR world. Imagine watching Jurassic Park or Avatar in VR! It takes time for any new technology to find user adoption and Virtual Reality has been no exception. But in recent times, it seems to have broken the barriers. One proxy for this claim is the news of VR headsets sale crossing 1 million last year. The ball has started rolling more and more in favor of the VR world. A whole industry is being formed, new technology being made, and VR is no longer just some hype. Top 7 modern Virtual Reality hardware systems SteamVR introduces new controllers for game developers, the SteamVR Input system Build a Virtual Reality Solar System in Unity for Google Cardboard  

Adobe has entered the augmented reality space with Adobe Aero, a new AR authoring tool, and multi-platform system. This system will provide means to both developers and creatives to build simple AR scenes and experiences leveraging Apple’s ARKit. Adobe sees Aero as the first step to outfit creative professionals with the tools they need to create immersive experiences that will transform the world. Announced as an early preview at Apple’s WWDC 2018, Adobe Aero will provide a means for designers to create immersive AR experiences from familiar creative tools such as Photoshop CC and Dimension CC. Adobe also plans to add usdz support to Adobe Creative Cloud apps and services in collaboration with Apple and Pixar. USDZ is described by its co-creator Pixar as a "zero-compression, unencrypted zip archive" of the USD (Universal Scene Description) format used for creating AR experiences. .usdz is now supported by Apple, Adobe, Pixar, and many others. Creative Cloud’s support of the usdz format will help speed up the development of new AR content and allow users to seamlessly move from one application to another. This immersive content can then be brought into Xcode for further refinement and development. Adobe Aero will also feature deep integration with Sensei, Adobe’s machine learning platform, to take care of the technical complexity so designers can focus on creative work alone. Adobe also plans to include the glTF file format, currently supported by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, and other industry leaders. AR projects created with Adobe Aero will be displayed at The Festival of the Impossible, a 3-day large-scale immersive art exhibition celebrating artwork by 15 talented artists. “This is just the beginning of our journey to extend digital experiences beyond the screen and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead,” says Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis. “We’ll have much more to share at the Adobe MAX Creativity Conference later this fall.” Developers and designers may request early access for Aero with a new form provided by Adobe. Adobe is going to acquire Magento for $1.68 Billion Amazon open sources Amazon Sumerian, its popular AR/VR app toolkit Microsoft introduces SharePoint Spaces, adds virtual reality support to SharePoint

Have you heard about the latest VPNFilter Malware attack? In brief, the software networking firm and its network analysis department known as ‘Talos’ identified a malware known as VPNFilter a few weeks ago. Something about these attacks made them particularly risky. If you are an individual or any small or medium business organization accessing the internet using routers from companies such as Linksys, Netgear, QNAP, TP-Link, ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE then you are vulnerable to the VPNFilter malware attack. Read on to understand where do you stand and what you can do to avoid falling victim of this vicious malware attack. How VPNFilter malware works? The first thing that you need to understand is that VPNFilter has a 3 stage attack procedure. The first stage, which is one of the most potent and dangerous one too, plants itself into the router firmware. In most malware attack cases, a reboot would make the malware go away. That’s where VPNFilter stands out. It persists through the reboot and after the reboot it initiates the second stage. The second stage is about spying on the user activity and data and then storing and accessing user data, tracking the URLs and getting to know more about the victim. The most terrifying factor is that the user never realizes that they have been attacked. The reason being that VPNFilter uses the technique of “Man in the Middle” or MitT attack. What happens in this form of cyber attack is that the spyware gets attached to the router and then collects user data and prepares for a larger assault while the user is completely unaware of it. The image below explains the process.     Source: Yeahhub.com If this seems scary to you then you haven’t yet heard the interesting bit yet. The third stage is about introducing different plugins which can perform different types of actions. One of them is it can downgrade the security level of your requests from HTTPS to HTTP protocol. This in turn makes your data unencrypted and also makes your passwords and other valuable data open to anyone who is snooping on your network. The rest of the hacking process then eventually becomes much easier. Imagine what could happen if you logged in to a social media platform or into your netbanking application and the data is phished away. The worst part is that you won’t even know that your account is hacked until the hackers expose themselves by making malicious transactions. The horror story doesn’t end here, it also comes with a “Remote Destroy” button. This enables the hackers to delete important network and configuration files from your router before destroying the malware and this means your router will be rendered useless after they choose to do so. This gives them the power to disrupt internet connectivity on a global scale since the number of routers presently affected can be anywhere around 500k. Is there a way out? How can you save your router from this onslaught. Rebooting doesn’t work. The only way that some groups have suggested is to restore factory defaults of your router, upgrade the firmware of your router, and log in with your credentials. This three step process might be the only way you can get away from this attack. How to know that your router is no good? Try updating it to the latest version of firmware, if it says unable to upgrade, you can be damn sure of the fact that it’s time for you to buy a new one. BeyondCorp is transforming enterprise security Top 5 cybersecurity assessment tools for networking professionals IoT Forensics: Security in an always connected world where things talk

Atlassian recently announced the release of their open source Kubernetes autoscaler project, Escalator. This project aims at resolving issues related with autoscaling where clusters were not fast enough in scaling up or down. Atlassian explained the problem with scaling up, which was when clusters hit capacity, users would have to wait for a long time for the additional Kubernetes workers to be booted up in order to assist with the additional load. Many builds cannot tolerate extended delays and would fail. On the other hand, the issue while scaling down was that when loads had subsided, the autoscaler would not scale-down fast enough. Though this is not really an issue when the node count is less, however a problem can arise when that number reaches hundreds and more. Escalator, written in Go, is the solution To address the problem with the scalability of the clusters, Atlassian created Escalator, which is a batch of job optimized autoscaler for Kubernetes. Escalator basically had two goals : Provide preemptive scale-up with a buffer capacity feature to prevent users from experiencing the 'cluster full' situation, Support aggressive scale-down of machines when they were no longer required. Atlassian also wanted to build a Prometheus metrics for the Ops team, to gauge how well the clusters were working. With Escalator, one need not wait for EC2 instances to boot and join the cluster. It also helps in saving money by allowing one to pay for the number of machines actually needed. It has also helped Atlassian save a lot of money, nearly thousands of dollars per day, based on the workloads they run. At present, Escalator is released as open source to the Kubernetes community. However, others can avail its features too. The company would be expanding the tool to its external Bitbucket Pipeline users, and would also explore ways to manage more service-based workloads. Read more about Escalator on the Atlassian blog. You can also check out its GitHub Repo. The key differences between Kubernetes and Docker Swarm Microsoft’s Azure Container Service (ACS) is now Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) Kubernetes Containerd 1.1 Integration is now generally available

DockerCon 2018 is around the corner and is taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week from 12th -15th June. More than 6,000 developers, architects, system admins, and other IT professionals are expected to get their hands on the latest enhancements in the container ecosystem. DockerCon is where people from the Docker community come together to learn, share, and collaborate. Here, you will find attendees from beginners, to intermediate and advanced experts who are interested in learning something new and enhancing their skill set. So, if you are interested in learning the modern ways of working with Docker then, this is your perfect chance. Here, you will have 2 full days of training, over a 100 session and hands-on labs, free workshops and more that will be brought to the table by different individuals. If you haven’t yet scheduled your DockerCon Agenda, here is the DockerCon Agenda Builder that will help you browse and search the sessions you are looking forward to in DockerCon 2018. With that being said, here are some interesting sessions you should not miss in your trip to DockerCon 2018. Automated Hardware Testing Using Docker for Space We already know how hard it is to cope up with space but that is not keeping Docker from thinking beyond web content. Space software development is difficult as they run on highly constrained embedded hardware. But Docker and its DevOps mentality helped DART create a scalable and rapidly deployable test infrastructure, in NASA’s mission to hit an asteroid at 6 km/s. This presentation will be all about how Docker can be used for both embedded development environment and scalable test environment. You will also learn about how Docker has evolved testing from a human-based testing to an automated one. Lastly, this presentation will summarize the do’s and don'ts of automated hardware testing, how you can play a key role in making a difference and what Docker wishes to achieve in the near future. Democratizing Machine Learning on Kubernetes One of the biggest challenges Docker is facing today is understanding how to build a platform that runs common open-source ML libraries such as Tensorflow. This session will be all about deploying distributed Tensorflow training cluster with GPU scheduling Kubernetes. This session will also teach you about the functioning of distributed training, its various options and which options to choose when. Lastly, this session will cover best practices on using distributed Tensorflow on top of Kubernetes. In the end, you will be provided with a public Github repository of the entire work presented in this session. Serverless Panel (Gloo function gateway) DockerCon 2018 is entirely based on your journey to containerization, where you will learn about modernizing traditional applications, adding microservices, and then serverless environments. One of the interesting development areas in 2018 is Gloo which is designed for microservice, monolithic, and serverless applications. It is a high-performance, plugin-extendable, platform-agnostic function gateway that enables the enterprise application developer to modernize a traditional application. Gloo containerizes a traditional application and uses microservices to add functions to it. Developers can then leverage orchestrated and routed portable serverless frameworks on top of Docker EE, or AWS Lambda to create hybrid cloud applications. Don’t Have A Meltdown! Practical Steps For Defending Your Apps With recent cybercrime events such as Meltdown and Spectre, security has become one of the major concerns for applications developers and operations teams. This session will demonstrate some best practices, configuration, and tools to effectively defend your container deployments from some common attacks. This session will be all about risks and preventive measures to be taken on authentication, injection, sensitive data, and more. All the events displayed in this session are inspired from highlights of OWASP Top 10 and other popular and massive attacks. By the end of this session, you will understand important security risks in your application and how you can go about mitigating them. Tips & Tricks of the Docker Captains This session is entirely focused on the tips and tricks for making the most out of Docker. These best practices will be from Docker Captains who will guide users in making common operations easier, addressing common misunderstandings, and avoiding common pitfalls. Topics covered in this session will revolve around build processes, security, orchestration, maintenance and more. This session will not only make new and intermediate user’s life easy with Docker but will also provide some new and valuable information to advanced users. DockerCon is considered as the number one container conference for IT professionals interested in learning and creating scalable solutions with innovative technologies. So, what are you waiting for? Start planning for DockerCon 2018 now and if you haven’t yet, you can register for DockerCon 2018 and get your container journey started. Related Links What’s new in Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0? Google Kubernetes Engine 1.10 is now generally available and ready for enterprise use Microsoft’s Azure Container Service (ACS) is now Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

Android Studio has been the IDE of choice for Android developers since its release in 2014. Version 3.2 of Android Studio was released at the end of April, bringing about a few very interesting changes to the Android Studio ecosystem. Here are the most important changes you need to be aware of: IAndroid Studio Jetpack has been updated and improved. The new, updated jetpack is going to make the overall development process much smoother and easier. It should minimize repetitive work and help to streamline the development workflow. New Navigation Editor. The new navigation editor helps developers to gain a better view of their app’s design and layout. It should make it much easier to plan navigational patterns between different parts of an app. AndroidX Refactoring. Android has introduced a new refactoring mechanism for the Android Support Libraries to a new Android extension library using the androidx namespace. The New App Bundle. The new dynamic app bundle is much smarter and intuitive than the previous version. Once you have created your app and uploaded its  resources, you won’t now need to generate customized APKs for different types of machines on which these APKs are going to run. You can now simply use the dynamic APK builder. This will automatically create different versions of the APK best suited to different machines. You can then add some added bundles for your app that can be downloaded by users on demand. Layout preview. During the app development process, the presence of runtime data can hamper the visualization capability of the app. This can affect the app design process. With the new  layout preview, you can preview your design using sample data in the layout editor. You can then change the data as you require, which will allow you to see a complete preview of your app design. Slice Functionality. Android Studio 3.2 will now create a preview of your app in Google Search results. This is what’s being called ‘slice functionality’. This will be particularly useful for mobile developers that want to think carefully and thoroughly about how they market their app. More new lint checks. Beyond Kotlin interoperability lint checks, Android Studio 3.2 is implementing 20 new lint checks. These will help developers find and identify common code problems. These new checks range from warnings about potential usability issues to high-priority errors regarding security vulnerabilities. New Gradle target. You can use the new lintFix Gradle task to apply all of the safe fixes suggested by the lint check directly to the source code. An example of a lint check that suggests a safe fix to apply is SyntheticAccessor. Metadata updates. Various metadata, such as the service cast check, have been updated for lint checks to work with Android P Developer Preview. Android Studio has been the default development environment for Android developers and with these new changes, it is trying to incorporate some cool new smart features which are sure to help the developers create better and faster apps more efficiently and save a lot of their development time. What is Android Studio and how does it differ from other IDEs? Unit Testing Apps with Android Studio The Art of Android Development Using Android Studio